Welcome to RocketMonkeys.com!

This is my personal site, where I store my rants, pictures, and movie reviews. Have a look around, register and leave comments.
-James

Finding new music, the computer way

Posted by james on May 23, 2006

I've been using the <a href="http://www.last.fm/">last.fm</a> way. It's awesome. If you go to the site, you can mark the music that you like, and it'll show you other songs/artists that are similar, much like netflix. It'll give you recommendations. And you can also use the player to listen to music that is (supposedly) tailored to your preferences. Awesome idea.

I love the idea of using statistics to help you find things. Just think; there's probably 100 albums released this year alone that you'd like, except you'll only find 3 of them through random circumstance. Or, if you watch MTV and listen to radio, you'll probaly find none of them. But if you use a statistical method to compare your preferences to other people's, then it should find the ones you'll like regardless of how popular or obscure your likes are. Awesome.

Just wait till Ben and I finish the everything everything project. Oh man, good stuff.

Little Carrots

Posted by james on May 22, 2006

I'm trying to eat healthier (which means hot wing night just every other night), and I've got some more vegetables in my fridge now. One of them is those little mini carrots. What's funny is that these carrots are more expensive than the normal big ones. And I doubt these are specially grown mini carrots; they're just big ones that have been chopped down and shaped to be rounded and neat. What if they sold big carrots that had simply been peeled and chopped, but were square. Would people eat them then? I know they'd be less appetizing.

It's more expensive, less efficient, and really makes no sense. But it also undeniable fits what people really want. We want little rounded mini-carrots that have been peeled, chopped, and shaped for us. We don't care that we're paying more for it or that there's pounds upon pounds of carrots shavings at some factory due to the waste of making these little things.

Last night the guys and I were talking about energy resources; ethanol, gasoline, solar, microwave from space. Why don't we just do ____, and then we wouldn't have to worry? The bottom line is that we'll do what's cheaper and what's more convenient for ourselves. We wont buy a solar car that costs twice as much as a normal car cause it's too expensive. We wont use public transportation because it's less convenient. We'll continue to be incredibly inefficient, wasting gasoline till it's too expensive, ignoreing infrastructure improvements and general conservation.

That is, until the robots finish converting the far side of the moon into a giant solar collector and beam the resulting energy to man-made islands off the coast of Japan, thereby solving the world's energy needs in a clean and effecient way. Can't wait.

Spammers

Posted by james on May 11, 2006

Wow, looks like some spammers finally noticed my site and started spamming my comments. First: I'm popular! Someone noticed me! Second: Screw you internet slime. You make the world a worse place.

I've put in a few simple blocks. When they get past those, I'll put in a few more. Soon I'm going to require logins.